One thing to be very aware of when I give that teaching when I talk about changing our attitude towards pain, I never say in that talk that we will make the pain go away. Always keep that in mind: I never, ever say that we will make the pain go away. In fact, it may get worse! It may go away, it may get worse, it may stay the same. We're going to change our attitude towards it. Hopefully then the pain in our mind and heart is not so bad.
Now, when it comes to real actual pain, I've got one example. These top two fingers, I almost cut them off once. It took four hours before I got a needle in my hand to take away the pain. So, I had this throbbing that was very intense, and I had to deal with it somehow. This was about seventeen years ago. I was an experienced meditator and I had a lot of these techniques. So, I would work with observing it as sensation, just sensation, very similar to what we teach here. I would get tired, exactly like this note says. It didn't go away, it stayed there, and I would get tired. I changed channels, just like this note says "What about reflection?" I would change into Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation for a while, like the D/D method: "There's other people with worse than this. It's only my fingers, it's no big deal if they cut the fingers off, take them away. You know, I'll still live." I worked with Compassion, thoughts like that. Until I got tired, the energy lowered, and I changed into breath awareness, just to try to escape the whole thing for a while, to not think about the fingers at all. I went into breath awareness, tried to hone in on the breath and basically escape using just pure concentration. When that got tired I went back to the fingers, back to the sensation, and I rotated these three techniques for four hours. So, that's how you can work with some real actual pain.